Youssef Nabil

I Won't Let You Die

"His images carry the same magical associations and aromas that madeleines evoked for Proust." (Simon Njami)

From Louise Bourgeois, Andreas Gursky, Zaha Hadid, and Shirin Neshat, to David Lynch, Omar Sharif, Sting, and Naguib Mahfouz: many artists and other celebrities from the worlds of film, music, and literature have posed for the camera of Egyptian photographer Youssef Nabil (*1972 in Cairo). His first portraits were of friends, taken after he finished studying literature in the early nineties before moving to New York and then Paris, where he worked as an assistant to photographers David LaChapelle and Mario Testino. His photographs—hand colored in the old tradition—reflect the photographer’s exploration of themes such as loneliness, sexuality, and death. At the same time, their visual language betrays a nostalgic longing for the glamour, elegance, and melodrama of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
This first comprehensive monograph is a collection of photographs of celebrities and friends, self-portraits, and staged images taken over the past fifteen years.